


faultless unity

by wildcard_47



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Draw Me Like One of Your French Girls, Francis Develops A Crush, James Already Has One, M/M, Not talking about our feelings, Secret Art Alert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 19:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17351486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildcard_47/pseuds/wildcard_47
Summary: Fitzjames has been keeping a secret from his Captain. Late one night, Francis seizes the opportunity to find out what it is.





	faultless unity

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by **blasted_heath** 's [Nor All That Is At Enmity With Joy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17331746), because I am a SUCKER for fics involving art.

Half-drunk, exhausted, and yet unable to retire to bed thanks to the continued presence of James Fitzjames, current Expedition Second and Perpetual Irritance Extraordinaire, Francis decided to spend the hour following dinner maintaining a pointed and begrudging silence. This was all done in a cunning attempt to finally drive the  _ Erebus  _ Captain from his ship, and therefore, from his company.

Tragically, this strategem had not succeeded one whit.

Unlike most evenings, James had not attempted to engage Francis in inane conversation about duties nor personal matters, nor had he decided to regale him with any of those thrice-blasted tales of triumph. 

At present, the man had spent over an hour and three quarters quietly sitting at the other end of the captain’s table, with naught but a sip of brandy and the battered black notebook he called a journal to occupy him. He was writing what Francis assumed was a personal expedition log, or perhaps some vile autobiography he had a wild hare of getting printed. As if anyone in the world should want to read such tripe all the way out here.

Honestly, Francis thought with a poorly-concealed smirk, it might very well be easier to go stumbling out into the bergs and to the nearest Netsilik camp if you sought to spread a heroic yarn. Yes, you would spend years translating half a world of English idioms and strange customs into recognizable tales, but in the end, they’d likely be passed down with more accuracy and in better form than they would be from any damned book.

Not that they’d ever get the chance to make such stupid comparisons.

“Something amuses you?” asked Fitzjames from the other end of the table.

Francis glanced up. The knowing smile dissolved from his face; he took another drink to hide it entirely. Nearly empty, now. Ought to refill before he sobered up.

“Not really.” He drained the rest of the whiskey from his glass. “Just – thinking.”

“I see.” The slight frown which appeared on James’s face belied his scepticism, although he did not dispute this, just scratched a few more words onto the page. 

Francis was too stunned to appreciate the rarity of not being contradicted to say anything else. They sat in silence for several more minutes, long enough for the  _ Erebus  _ Captain to finally sit back, put his pen in the inkwell, and get to his feet.

This done, Fitzjames stretched his arms overhead, till his fingers nearly brushed the ceiling and his shirt came untucked from his trousers.

As he observed this, hope bloomed fierce in Francis’s chest. “Oh. Are you going, then?”

Lowering his arms, James shook his head no before pushing his forelock back into place amid his other curls. “Not quite yet, no.” He cleared his throat. “Belay your upcoming celebrations, if you please. I am merely off to see if Jopson will fetch us more coffee.”

With that, he turned on his heel and left the room.

Francis had just thought of a very cutting insult in the meantime, and raised his voice to ensure James might hear it. “Sure he’d get you whatever you wanted, long as it meant you were returning to – oh, damn it!”

The lack of footsteps likely meant that James had not just stepped into the outer room, as was his custom, but had left the area entirely. Jopson must have been up in the galley and not in the officer’s ward.

Pouting at being unable to deliver what had been a damn good jape, Francis stood, stretched the stiffness from his own limbs, and slouched around the other side of the table with his glass in hand, until he reached the chair where James had been sitting.

The placing of James’s things was neatness embodied: a notebook sat several inches from the edge of the table, laid perfectly perpendicular to the grooves of each long timber used to make it, whilst the pen stood upright in its inkwell just above the book, practically casting a long, thin line through the center of the leather cover. Like latitude and longitude, Francis thought with a sudden grin. Demarcating….well, perhaps some idiot monologue on how cold it was here, and how one’s curling tongs could not operate at full efficiency any longer.

Grinning at yet another clever insult, Francis glanced backwards to ensure he was still alone in the cabin. Since he was, he reached out and flipped the front cover of James’s journal open, along with an inch or so of filled pages. No need to look at the first few entries if he were going to read anything. Probably just the idiot remembering how to write his own...

_ Christ above. _

When he finally registered what he was seeing, Francis’s mouth dropped open.

He stood and stared and stared till he thought he might pitch backwards, as unsteady as a ship encountering the rise and fall of a sudden wave.

It was not, as he had initially assumed, a journal.  Not exactly. 

James had created perhaps sixty or seventy pages of handwritten entries and notes which detailed the most relevant parts of their journey, all the way from London to Greenhithe and Baffin Bay and beyond. But the volume itself was less a plain biography than a genuine work of art. 

On first impression, it reminded Francis of a modern illustrated manuscript, leapt entire from the head of one man instead of the nibs of a dozen overwrought sexless monks. Among the notations and brief anecdotes were perhaps hundreds of drawings documenting their voyage – everything from mere doodles to full-page colour renderings.

Jesus God.

Francis turned a page, then another, and still yet another, struck mute with wonder.

These were magnificent.

Here stood Sir John and Lady Jane in the Great Cabin on the day of their departure, pictured with an as-yet-unclothed Jacko. Sir John was in full uniform, smiling indulgently over all in frame amid a table littered with supplies and ephemera, while Jane twinkled with impish delight up at the small scoundrel which currently graced her shoulder. It fisted two locks of her dark hair in its impossibly tiny hands. 

Both man and wife had been drawn and then colored in rather messily, judging by the spatter of inkblots in one corner – and yet their spirits had been captured so true to life that even glancing at the drawing made Francis’s stomach clench – with what strange cocktail of emotions, he could not yet parse. He was not sure he had ever seen the two of them pictured so cheerful together, even in portraits.

And on the next page – Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Rendered so exquisitely that Francis felt his legs wobble at the very sight of those long-lashed eyes beneath her yellow-and-blue-trimmed bonnet – yes, here was Sophia on the very same day, poised just beside the ladder up to the quarterdeck. With one fine and delicate hand wrapped gingerly around the rail, and the other poised just above her brow as if she were peering off the edge of the crow’s nest, she swung outward from the final step on naught but a foot, as delightedly as a ship’s boy on his first vessel, or perhaps more like a ballerina in a commanding debut performance. Even in black and white, Francis could have envisioned the orbital movement of her body in every finely-sketched line on the page. As this drawing was in color, it felt additionally vivid; he felt he could see her rotate on the stair before she should drop such a silly act, and tiptoe down onto the solid surface of the deck at last. Laughing as she met his own distant, likely disapproving gaze.

_ Well, Captain Crozier? Am I graceful enough to pass muster? _

His heart clenched anew. A telltale sting in his eyes told him he ought to turn the page before it got the better of him.

Glancing behind once more to ensure James nor Jopson were nearby, Francis looked through – but did not linger over – innumerable pictures of  _ Erebus  _ and the men, and life aboard Sir John’s ship. Every man aboard seemed to be represented, whether it was a half-awake LeVesconte eating oatmeal in the officer’s mess, Bridgens sitting in his berth dusting his collection of books, or a ship’s boy Francis did not recognize learning how to tie knots, brimming with visible pride as he held the latest one aloft.

These were, Francis admitted, the sorts of depictions a great many London portraitists – chief among them the idiots who’d actually been paid to take daguerreotypes of all the expedition’s officers – might go stark raving mad over. Each drawing appeared so realistic it was frankly astonishing.

This was no mere fool’s hobby. James possessed real talent.

Mid-turn to the next page, Francis recoiled, and drew back his fingers as quickly if he had been burned.

This portrait was of him.

Here, amid a wintry, snow-blown landscape which actually made Francis shiver to observe it – rendered in delicate hints of white and grey and navy and black – was an image of him viewed from some distance, lingering at Sir John’s grave.

The men were naught but blurs of dark coats and hats in the bottom left corner of the page, whilst the remaining background featured the high masts of Erebus and Terror towering over the bergs in the distance. And yet it was not the ships to which Francis was drawn – no, it was to his own crow-like figure. Wearing his Captain’s greatcoat and hat, he stood impossibly tall, still at parade rest – yet with a certain downward tilt of his chin that suggested he was now burdened beyond measure. 

And the look on his face as James had depicted it… Francis was honestly not certain if he had ever appeared so haggard nor so visibly wounded in front of their combined men. Jopson would not have permitted him to look untidy, nor would he have willingly appeared undisciplined in front of the company. But at James’s hands, this depiction did not showcase Francis as a pathetic wastrel of a leader so much as it suggested an ordinary Navy man who had been bowed by sudden grief. 

The swirl of snow around his flapping greatcoat evoked a great many things. Confusion. Regret. Solitude.

This portrait was titled merely  _ Lost,  _ in James’s slanted handwriting.

After several seconds, Francis turned the page again.

Here were still more drawings – good Lord, these were Francis’s own weathered hands, right down to the odd constellation of freckles at the back of his right palm! Fidgeting restlessly over his instruments as he fixed the ship’s position. When had James time or inclination to study his hands to such a degree? And here – these were Francis’s eyes! Although his face boasted all the harsh crags, dark circles, and crow’s feet he’d acquired over the years, even Francis could admit the whole was a better likeness than most others had been able to put together. One eyebrow was cocked in sharp surprise or perhaps disdain, likely due to some idiot story James had been telling at the time. 

It was not handsome, but it looked vaguely like his reflection, if nothing else. And he had managed to make Francis appear amused instead of merely hideous, which was nothing short of miraculous.

Francis turned another page.

Here was rendered some imagined society evening, featuring a line of dancers amid what appeared to be Sir John’s front parlor. Ladies and gentlemen of faceless parties stood scattered in conversation, while a couple of blurred footmen plied guests with rich food and refreshments. The entire scene was framed by glittering chandeliers and swirls of bright color.

Two people stood in the foreground of this painting: himself – if the dress uniform was to be believed – and Sophia Cracroft, who was standing in front of him in the yellow gown she had worn to the send off at Liverpool.

Judging by the body language – slightly bowed, right arm outstretched – the Francis of the picture appeared to be asking for a dance or perhaps formally greeting Sophia; it was not precisely clear, as his face was not entirely visible. 

But the delighted look in Sophia’s eyes as she stretched out her hand to him in turn seemed genuine. She wore the bubbly smile he had witnessed on many an occasion. It was the wry, teasing expression that pinked up her cheeks in all the most pleasing ways.

Of course the situation was all conjecture on James’s part. Probably based on some plate glass portrait, or an illustration he had spotted in another volume, or perhaps on some other unknown time James had last seen Sophia out in public. 

But the drawing itself was obviously inspired by the conversation he and James had recently held on  _ Erebus,  _ less than a few weeks ago. Francis supposed it was moving, in a sense, to know that his words and their conversations had left such a deep impression on the man. That they had inspired him to draw something so beautiful from imagination alone. But in another way, it was also puzzling. 

How on earth could James have created all of these pictures in such detail, and in such tremendous numbers, without giving even one jot of his effort away? And how were they all so striking in their vivid mundanity? Where were the flowers and the gilded ornaments? Innumerable complaints about long hours bent over such laborious work? Or braggadocious calls for praise? Why should James not ask every man aboard to view and admire such prodigious talent, when this was a topic he could proudly show off or perhaps even profit from, all at his leisure?

Shaking his head in disbelief, Francis turned to the next and perhaps final page, marked by a single sheet of scrap paper dotted with stray daubs of ink and paint. Careful not to touch the face of the newest piece, lest he mar the ink, he beheld another astonishing sight.

This rendering was also of him, from a rather close vantage point, as he must have been sat in that chair mere minutes ago. Looking up to view the room as James had thus visualized it from this very spot, Francis was shocked to notice the studied details which had crept into the edges of this portrait: the slight hint of wrought leaves and curliques carved into the bookshelves, or the odd sheen of the china under Preston’s Patent Illuminators, or the pronounced grains of the mahogany tabletop. All details he had long ago stopped noticing, although James portrayed each with fresh eyes.

And Francis himself was sketched with soft, painstaking care, right down to the nip and tucks of his dark waistcoat around his shirtsleeves – really, the only non-issue waistcoat he had left that was decent. Although the same suggestion of pockmarks and lines remained in his face and hands, somehow James had transmuted Francis’s half-permanent scowl into an expression less like childish sulking and more… uncontained. 

One arm – hand wrapped loosely around a whisper of cut glass – was propped up on the table at the elbow, while he was leaned to one side with his weight forward. His other arm lay boneless against a spill of charts and papers. His eyes were unfocused, staring out toward the wall. And though he still held his glass in one hand, as if poised to take a drink, his mouth rested almost against the rim of it. 

Although James had not filled in the glass’s contents, Francis swore he could still catch a dram of whiskey sparkling in the bottom.

He had entitled this piece  _ Thoughtful. _

The lid of a coffee pot clanged within mere feet of where he was currently standing.

_ Hell and damnation! _

Quickly, Francis slammed shut the journal, near enough to how it had been before, took up his empty glass, and scurried back around the table, just in time to see Jopson come around the corner, with James following directly behind.

“Coffee for you, Captain Fitzjames,” said Thomas as he placed the tray at the edge of the table. He set out two cups and saucers, along with the sugar and a covered plate. “And some hot biscuits for you both, if you’d like them.” Meeting Francis’s unamused gaze with clear eyes. “Since you may be another hour at least, please do not hesitate to ask me for anything else.”

Fitzjames gave the steward a winning smile. “My thanks, Mister Jopson. You have been most hospitable.”

So he would be staying, for the time being.

Francis sighed, and bit back the curses which hovered on the tip of his tongue. “Thank you, Jopson.”

With a knowing nod, and after pouring him another small measure of whiskey, the steward departed, and shut the door behind him.

It was a shame Jopson had left so soon, because for once in his life, Francis wanted to begin a conversation, and had no one to assist him save for the drink and his own mettle.

“So, ah. What are you working on, then? That can’t be done on  _ Erebus _ ?”

James had not yet opened the sketchbook up again, but he did meet Francis’s curious gaze in a perplexed way, as if he had not possibly heard the question correctly. “What?”

_ Damn it. _

“Well, you seem busy,” Francis continued, speaking mainly to his scattered papers. “Or something close to it.”

Fitzjames took a long time to answer this horrible excuse for an inquiry. “Not with any pressing duty, thank goodness.”

“Yes. We can be glad for small mercies.”

Another heavy silence settled around them.

“Are you, er,” and here James cleared his throat, gestured to the papers between them, “is there anything I might help you with instead?”

“What? Oh, bleeding Christ, no.” Damn it again. Francis bit the inside of his jaw to keep from sputtering out additional curses. “I mean – no. I'm not – I fear productivity eludes me for the time being.”

James smiled at this. It was not a very good joke, and the smile was merely polite, but Francis felt vindicated by this expression all the same.

“Well. That is to be expected on some evenings, is it not?”

By God, would the man really speak no word about his pastimes, even when directly asked? Francis was suddenly bursting with questions and curiosities, everything from the dreadfully pedestrian ( _ how do you get the expressions so accurate?)  _ to the shockingly personal ( _ why in all that time do you never draw yourself?) _

“Suppose it must be. Although I do not think you are afflicted with such ills. You have hardly put your pen down in the past two hours.” Francis took another drink, in lieu of safeguarding what was likely a very guilty expression. “I assume it has been productive, at any rate. Writing your memoirs or – whatever else you are occupied in doing.”

“Yes. It has gone decently enough, I suppose. And I trust I am not intruding on your time, despite the late hour.”

Francis averted his eyes again, suddenly discomfited by James’s unwillingness to talk. “No, no. It – long as you’re not blathering on about that damned Tartar bullet, or equally hideous topics, you may remain here tonight as long as you wish.”

Fitzjames actually snorted aloud, and looked surprised at his own merriment after he had done this, although he did not say anything in reply. After another moment, he met Francis’s now-mischievous gaze head-on, mouth twitching with clear amusement.

“That is most magnanimous of you, Francis.”

Francis grinned. The irony of the moment did not escape his notice. “I am capable of much generosity when the mood strikes. Perhaps it goes hand in hand with idleness, hm?”

“Well. Return to your idling, then, sir,” James motioned to Francis’s refreshed glass with the pen now clutched in his hand, “and I shall take advantage of your magnanimity for perhaps an hour longer, no more.”

“Suit yourself,” replied Francis with a careless shrug.

Sighing, he sat back in his chair. As he shifted around for better purchase, and James opened his notebook once again, he found he could not resist glancing back at his Second now that he knew what so occupied James’s energies. Once. Twice. Again.

When next his eyes darted left, James’s gaze was fixed directly on his; the feeling of being scrutinized to the core was by turns startling and strange. Made his neck flush hot.

“Something the matter, Francis?”

“No.” Finding himself unable to do anything save drink, Francis gulped down another swallow of whiskey, and tried to set aside the curious prickling feeling of being inspected, so that he might go back to his charts, or indeed, back to a time when he did not realise he was being put to paper. “Nothing at all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Because I could read probably a billion pages about James drawing life on the ship (as well as drawing pictures of Francis), my brain decided I also wanted to read a story about Francis secretly discovering James's huge talent, and being completely overwhelmed by this information. So here you go!
> 
> Title taken from a quote describing Francisco Goya: "the last great painter in whose art thought and observation were balanced and combined to form a faultless unity."


End file.
